The “left over” tobacco recovered from select unfinished butts in an outside coffee can ashtray wrapped in a page torn from the Bible. Leviticus or Revelation only, and only because you currently, honestly believe it would be better than nicotine withdrawal.

5 cigarettes:

Normal, invisible air:

“I guess you’d say I’m on my way to Burma-Shave,” sings Tom Waits in the 1977 song “Burma-Shave”. But where is he going with his female friend? Somewhere, but nowhere in particular. They are just going, getting away from trouble with the law, and from a town that doesn’t have the distinction of being a dead end; it’s just “a wide spot in the road”. Burma-Shave isn’t a destination, and it isn’t even a journey, which implies some kind of specificity. Burma-Shave is the anonymous, insignificant, American ubiquity, the inland ocean in which a person could lose themselves. It is the road; or rather, it is the road-side.

There’s something nostalgically current about this story that grabs me. Maybe the viral nature of the campaign that capitalized on the baby-boomers’ generational separation from their parents via the interstate highway system that connected the east coast from the west by 5 days and a now easily-obtainable, used automobile or a ride.

Not just Western Washington, which shows in this photo around Mt. Rainier, but this was on my flight back from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Mt. Rainier peeking above the fog of California fire smoke.

Returning to Seattle from a short trip to Salt Lake City, I snapped this photo of Mt. Rainier. But while I was in Utah, I was warned repeatedly that the air there was a so bad that emergency care centers were being overwhelmed with patients experiencing urgent respiratory issues.

I’ve never experienced anything like that, no matter the air quality, until this trip. I was explaining to my mom that we couldn’t stay long due to some unforeseen circumstances when suddenly I started into a coughing fit. That has never happened to me. Could be a one-off.

In the above photo, I had to review it several times to be sure it wasn’t a photo of Mt. Rainier with some extreme color-banding in the clouds. This is smoke over the mountains surrounding Mt. Rainier as we approach Seattle to land at SeaTac Airport.

I have no doubt that President Trump will soon use this example of believable, but fake video editing to tweet something like “See folks? I told you that wasn’t my voice on the Access Hollywood tape. Totally FAKE! Believe Me!!!” if he hasn’t already.

I’ve read reviews of Anna von Hausswolff’s previous albums in print magazines and online, but I had never bought any of her music. Then I read a four-star review of her new album, Dead Magic, in the April issue of MOJO Magazine where James McNair described her vocal performance for the song “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra” as “…astonishing. With its whoops, shudders and sandpaper-throated expulsions, her singing sounds like an exorcism”. Okay then, tell me more! McNair describes where and how the album was created:

Recorded in nine days, largely using the hulking 20th century pipe-organ at Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken, or Marble Church, …With it’s spidery strings, drones, suspensions and drama-rich support from Hausswolff’s five-piece backing band, Dead Magic comes on like a horror soundtrack-in-waiting, its 47-minute journey bridged by just five songs. Thematically, it’s big on myths, legends and oblivion, and the darker more esoteric kind of magic you wouldn’t likely associate with Ali Bongo.

Never mind other people’s perceptions; she’s more perplexed by her reaction to her own music. “When I start becoming ugly, or raw or unfiltered, that’s also when the most interesting things happen,” she says. “But I feel shame because that’s not how you’re supposed to present yourself as a female. I’m quite a modern girl – and luckily in Sweden we have a very open mind towards women in arts – but I still get that feeling that I’m in a place I shouldn’t be, doing things you really shouldn’t do, like I’m fighting the ideals projected down from our ancestors.”

The paucity of women in extreme music means these stereotypes are even tougher to break: “They have to defend what they’re doing so hard because they’re in a male-dominated genre, so there’s more focus on them being female than on their work. It’s still weird for people to see someone screaming her nuts out, playing loud music. I think, how can it be shocking any more? We still haven’t broken down our idea of how the genders should be.” Old, male pipe organ custodians just about manage to avoid patting her on the head when they show her around their instruments. “Usually I just smile and let the music speak for itself, and then afterwards they’re always shocked and don’t know what to say any more.”

Trump’s GOP Tax Plan Isn’t What it Seems

Every day I learn something new about the Trump-led GOP tax reform bill, but today I learned a steaming pantload of really frightening things about not just the bill, but also the sneaky Trojan Horse style of politics that seem to be unfolding here.

The Tax Plan is being passed under the rules of reconciliation so that it doesn’t have to reach the 60 vote majority in the Senate.

The Senate has crammed this bill full of language that fundamentally changes the rules on a variety of social issues unrelated to tax reform.

While we focus on the endless stream of clowns coming out of the passenger side of the car, we’re not paying attention to what’s getting in on the driver’s side.

Counting down the days

I’ll try to refrain from weeping into my keyboard long enough each day to keep this updated. And only really sneaky shit makes the list. And I really expect the world to implode some time before Christmas gets here anyway, so don’t expect a novel.

“the chained CPI was really an attempt to reduce the deficit on the backs of senior citizens” – New Republic

This is pretty insidious. The Consumer Price Index is a measure of the cost of a list of essential items and is used to define things like poverty levels, living wage, inflation, and income disparity. The chained CPI turns it upside down, starting first with the amount of money people can live on and then averaging out which common items one can get on that budget. This calculus includes trade-offs against quality of life, such as buying processed chicken instead of steak, bundling up rather than turning on the heat, and shopping at thrift stores.

“We’re really worried that changing the law in this way would open the floodgates for political contributions to be funneled through all 501(c)(3) organizations, fundamentally changing the nature of houses of worship and indeed our entire nonprofit sector.” – 90.9 WBUR-FM, Boston’s NPR news station

“Nothing shall prevent an unborn child from being treated as a designated beneficiary or an individual under this section” – Brookings Institute, featuring this beauty from Politico: “The proposed tax plan is a huge leap forward for an antiquated tax code, and we hope this is the first step in expanding the child tax credit to include unborn children as well.”

“The ploy appears to be to destroy higher education, to shift the tax burden onto the most educated rather than the most financially successful, and to disincentivize graduate school as a viable option for the majority of people who’d choose to pursue it otherwise.” – Ethan Siegel, Forbes

Axios reports that President Donald Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, has taken credit for the @realdonaldtrump account’s tweet claiming Mike Flynn was fired for lying to the FBI.

I still want to know how it’s even legal for Trump’s Twitter account to present questions about the source of a tweet. Is his account to be considered official communications from the White House? Or is it an outlet where authorship is determined only by political convenience depending on the content?

As the indictments roll in, President Donald Trump (PDT) has taken to Twitter as his choice platform for denouncing the Constitutional protections provided by the foundational documents of the nation with which he’s found himself executively charged.

It was reported that PDT was clearly discombobulated due to a lack of sleep, setting the stage for an afternoon, post-siesta announcement that PDT may not be serving its original purpose. This was the first clear indication of the administration’s intentions to reverse the early 20th century policy of arbitrarily adding one hour before anyone wakes up to accommodate the mythical schedules of farming families at a time when they were seen as fundamental to the health of national economics.

“We have a history of making huge changes that do nothing but make things easier for our twenty closest associates in the great body of the United States of America’s Ruling Class, and PDT is absolutely recognized as one of those changes,” said one high-level Trump administration volunteer.

Paul Manafort, whose name translates, according to certain interpretations of ancient texts, to “Paul, Man of the Fort”, did not respond immediately to requests for comment. A young man who identified himself only as “Ma! Ma? I have cookie? No-no! Bad-man-da-phone-pa-pop!” agreed to speak with us via telephone, anonymously as far as we could tell. His story seemed strained and inconsistent, occasionally taking several minutes to speak with someone he would only refer to as “Data” and asking for an audience with “the party”, saying repeatedly to “Data” that he “need to go to the party. Have to go to party, Data!” followed almost immediately by the sounds of a few people clapping and then a flushing noise. Clear signals of guilt.

President Trump said on Tuesday “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, Va. The statement comes a day after Trump specifically called out the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists — and three days after his initial statement on the protests, for which he was criticized for not condemning those groups and instead cited violence “on many sides.”

…

Tuesday’s apparent backtrack came during a televised event about infrastructure attended by some members of his Cabinet. Trump took questions from reporters, who asked about his earlier statements and their timing. When pressed, the president pushed back and began placing blame on counterprotesters and the “alt left.”

…

Instead, he returned to equating the demonstrators — who came to the college town to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, donning Confederate flags and swastikas, some carrying guns and shields, chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” — with counterprotesters.

… and in the transcript section at the bottom of the NPR piece is a very revealing Trump quote:

You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides [emphasis added].

Right… those racist bigots on the alt-right side are very fine people – model citizens!

Trump’s erratic, volatile statements elicit such strong responses from the public, the media, elected representatives and other government officials that his agenda gets buried in the dust. He is without a doubt the worst leader to ever reside in the White House. He lacks any sense of right and wrong, and is ignorant of how government works. He is overtly vainglorious and responds to those who criticize him with impulsive, petulant tweets.

How much longer can such a morally bankrupt, incompetent person hold the office of President of the United States of America?

Developer Curiosity

Many, many years ago, as an open source PHP and WordPress developer, I had a system for testing arbitrary PHP as I honed my skills and learned new techniques. I had a file on my web server called test-php.php that did nothing but output the results of my code and would spend hours writing code, upload to server, switch to browser, refresh. This is how I learned the basics of regex, converted base64, tested operators, and refined my database access techniques.

I’m with Swift!

On a bored and underutilized day in 2012, I decided to figure out how to write an app to simplify the process. I had similarly written two apps previously, the first of which was a rip on a crazy flub by the Mitt Romney campaign when they released a campaign app called, “I’m with Mitt!” which would overlay Mitt Romney “Oh ’12“ campaign slogans on live photos. Hilariously, their developers failed to QC it thoroughly, ending up with a silly typo on the main overlay which draped the photos, meant to be shared socially using the app’s built-in functionality, with the slogans, “A Better Amercia” and “I’m with Mitt”. That was not typo in my post. I know how to spell America. So, being smart like I am, I built an app that did the exact same thing. Except I misspelled “Mitt” as “Milt”. I called it “I’m with Milt” and overlookably misspelled something in every overlay. …